Abstract
It is critical for any organisation to be able to grow and sustain its long term survival. This has become even more challenging in a world where organisations are currently competing in tough and fast-paced environments where there is stiff competition from increased globalisation, product and technological innovations, new and existing competitors and rapidly changing consumer buying behaviour. As a result, employees have become an integral part of any organisation as they are crucial to its sustainability and competitiveness.
Employee engagement (EE) is a concept that has been generating significant interest amongst researchers in recent years. Engaged employees are key to an organisation’s competitive advantage. Organisations with an engaged workforce tend to perform well, thus giving their competitors a tough time. It is easy for the competition to imitate products and change their pricing, however creating or having engaged employees is not something that can be easily imitated.
It has become crucial for leaders to acknowledge the fact that engaged employees are essential for an organisation’s growth and survival as they positively contribute towards successful achievement of organisational objectives. A key focus of this study was to explore the relationship between work environment, training and development, diversity and EE.
The research approach was quantitative in nature, making use of secondary raw data, which had been originally obtained through a survey which was carried out using an existing structured questionnaire. This approach was chosen because it enabled the researcher to statistically investigate the relationship between the variables using descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and multiple regression analysis.
The population size of the financial organisation where the secondary data was obtained from was N = 32565. The population size included staff that was working in all the countries in which the organisation operates. A sample size of N = 14800 was obtained. However, the sample used for this study only focused on the employees based in Botswana (n = 200); Lesotho (n = 182) and Namibia n = 200). A final sample of n = 582 after accounting for missing data was used...
M.Phil.